Library Highlights: Entertainment & the Law

Dealmaking in the Film & Television Industry: From Negotiations to Final Contracts
Mark Litwak
KF4290 .L58 2009
From the Publisher: Dealmaking—the popular, award-winning “self-defense” book for everyone working in the film and television industry—is now updated to include the latest legal rulings and entertainment technology developments. Addressing a general, non-attorney readership, it is a fascinating, highly accessible guide to current entertainment law’s peculiarities, “creative” practices, and practical applications.

The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court
Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski Jr.
KF4300 .W58 2008
From the Publisher: It was only a forty-minute foreign film, but it sparked a legal confrontation that has left its mark on America for more than half a century. Roberto Rossellini’s Il Miracolo (The Miracle) is deceptively simple: a demented peasant woman is seduced by a stranger she believes to be Saint Joseph, is socially ostracized for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, but is finally redeemed through motherhood. Although initially approved by state censors for screening in New York, the film was attacked as sacrilegious by the Catholic establishment, which convinced state officials to revoke distributor Joseph Burstyn’s license. In response, Burstyn fought back through the courts and won.

Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond Haberski show how the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1952 ruling in Burstyn’s favor sparked a chain of litigation that eventually brought filmmaking under the protective umbrella of the First Amendment, overturning its long-outdated decision in Mutual v. Ohio (1915).

. . . More than the inside story of one case, this book explores the unique place that the movies occupy in American culture and the way that culture continues to be shaped by anxiety over the social power of movies. The Burstyn decision weakened the ability of state censorship boards and the Catholic Church to influence the types of films Americans were allowed to see. Consequently, the case signaled the rise of a new era in which films would be more mature and more controversial than ever before. Focusing on this single most important case in the jurisprudence surrounding motion picture expression, Wittern-Keller and Haberski add a significant new dimension to the story of cinema, censorship, and the history of First Amendment protections.

Music and Copyright
Ronald S. Rosen
KF3035 .R67 2008
From the Publisher: The highly topical area of copyright law, as applied to music, is widely misunderstood by lawyers, business people, and – perhaps most seriously – the federal judiciary. More than ever, there is a need to understand music infringement issues within the context of copyright litigation. In Music and Copyright, Ron Rosen provides readers with a practical and strategic roadmap to the music infringement litigation process, beginning with the client’s claim or defense and continuing through the selection and use of trial experts, discovery, motion practice, and trial.

Renowned for his expertise and career-long commitment to entertainment, intellectual property, and commercial litigation, Ron Rosen has condensed his experience into an essential guide for anyone involved in music-infringement litigation. Packed with elucidating examples from the author’s own practice, Music and Copyright navigates the often thorny terrain between notions of the legal and the musical providing practical advice, case studies, forms, and commentary along the way.

Entertainment Law & Business: A Guide to the Law and Business Practices of the Entertainment Industry
Jay Shanker, David E. Guinn, and Harold Orenstein
KF4290 .S53 2008
From the Publisher: Entertainment Law and Business is a handy resource for both the experienced and novice practitioner. It provides a broad survey of the entire industry and creative rights laws. It includes incisive summaries of all of the important areas of creative rights law: copyrights, the protection of ideas, trademark, publicity and privacy, and the major international treaties. It also provides an overview of all the major fields of entertainment (and related fields of interest for entertainment practitioners) along with illustrative agreements.

This is not an esoteric academic treatise. The book aims to aid the practitioner in the practical aspects of entertainment. Hence, the authors have attempted to highlight the key features of the major agreements in each field. They provide insights not only into what the individual provisions of the agreement attempts to regulate, but also the concerns that lie behind those provisions. They point to the types of negotiating strategies important in each agreement, passing on their experience to the practitioner.

Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915-1981
Laura Wittern-Keller
PN1995.62 .W58 2008
From the Publisher: At the turn of the twentieth century, the proliferation of movies attracted not only the attention of audiences across America but also the apprehensive eyes of government officials and special interest groups concerned about the messages disseminated by the silver screen. Between 1907 and 1926, seven states-New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Kansas, Maryland, and Massachusetts-and more than one hundred cities authorized censors to suppress all images and messages considered inappropriate for American audiences […].

[S]ome industry outsiders, independent distributors who believed that movies deserved the free speech protections of the First Amendment, brought legal challenges to censorship at the state and local levels. Freedom of the Screen chronicles both the evolution of judicial attitudes toward film restriction and the plight of the individuals who fought for the right to deliver provocative and relevant movies to American audiences. As the fight against censorship progressed case by case through state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, legal authorities and the public responded, growing increasingly sympathetic toward artistic freedom. Because a small, unorganized group of independent film distributors and exhibitors in midtwentieth-century America fought back against what they believed was the unconstitutional prior restraint of motion pictures, film after 1965 was able to follow a new path, maturing into an artistic medium for the communication of ideas, however controversial. Government censors would no longer control the content of America’s movie screens.

Music, Money, and Success: The Insider’s Guide to Making Money in the Music Business
Jeffrey Brabec & Todd Brabec
R673 ML3790 .B72 2008
From the Publisher: Songwriting, licensing, contracts, film & tv, composing, the internet, Broadway, recording and music publishing is a business. This book tells you how the business works… What you must know to succeed… and how much money you can make. The Brabecs, are former recording artists, entertainment lawyers, and legal services attorneys.

Library Highlights: Law & Economics

The Economic Approach to Law
Thomas J. Miceli
K487.E3 M528 2009
From the Publisher: [This book] provides an introductory treatment of law and economics, revealing how economic principles explain the structure of the law, and how they can help make the law more efficient. To that end, the author focuses on unifying themes in the field—rather than exhaustively covering legal topics—and thus provides a more analytical treatment of the subject. The second edition includes current research into the economics of common law areas, such as torts, contracts, and property law. The revised text also offers a new chapter that explores how economics can be applied to anti-trust law, as well as added material on intellectual property. This edition features an expanded suite of exercises and problems at the end of each chapter to encourage students to “do” law and economics.

Theoretical Foundations of Law and Economics
edited by Mark D. White
K487.E3 T48 2009
From the Publisher: The economic approach to law, or ‘law and economics’, is by far the most successful application of basic economic principles to another scholarly field, but most of the critical appraisal of the field has been scattered among law reviews and economics journals. Theoretical Foundations of Law and Economics is the first original, book-length examination of the methodology and philosophy of law and economics, featuring new essays written by leading legal scholars, philosophers, and economists. The contributors take issue with many of the key tenets of the economic approach to law, such as its assumption of rational behavior, its reliance on market analogies, and its adoption of efficiency as the primary goal of legal decision-making. They discuss the relevance of economics to the law in general, as well as to substantive areas of the law, such as contracts, torts, and crime.

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Paul Krugman
HB3716 .K77 2009
From the Publisher: Our newest Nobel Prize-winning economist shows how today’s crisis parallels the events that caused the Great Depression—and explains what it will take to avoid catastrophe. In 1999, in The Return of Depression Economics, Paul Krugman surveyed the economic crises that had swept across Asia and Latin America, and pointed out that those crises were a warning for all of us: like diseases that have become resistant to antibiotics, the economic maladies that caused the Great Depression were making a comeback. In the years that followed, as Wall Street boomed and financial wheeler-dealers made vast profits, the international crises of the 1990s faded from memory. But now depression economics has come to America: when the great housing bubble of the mid-2000s burst, the U.S. financial system proved as vulnerable as those of developing countries caught up in earlier crises and a replay of the 1930s seems all too possible.

In this new, greatly updated edition of [this book], Krugman shows how the failure of regulation to keep pace with an increasingly out-of-control financial system set the United States, and the world as a whole, up for the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. He also lays out the steps that must be taken to contain the crisis, and turn around a world economy sliding into a deep recession. Brilliantly crafted in Krugman’s trademark style–lucid, lively, and supremely informed–this new edition of The Return of Depression Economics will become an instant cornerstone of the debate over how to respond to the crisis.

Capacitas: Contract Law and the Institutional Preconditions of a Market Economy
edited by Simon Deakin and Alain Supiot
K840 .C36 2009
From the Publisher: One of the principal tasks for legal research at the beginning of the 21st century is to reconstruct the understanding of the relationship between the legal system and the market order. After almost three decades of deregulation driven by a belief in the self-equilibrating properties of the market, the financial crisis of 2008 has reminded everyone of the fundamental truth that markets have legal and institutional foundations, without which they cannot effectively function. The chapters in the present volume are the result of work by a group of legal scholars which began in the mid-2000s, at a time when the shortcomings of deregulatory policies were becoming clear in a number of contexts. The chapters address the question of how the language of contract law describes or conceptualises the market order and the relationship of the law to it. The perspectives taken are, in turn, historical, comparative, and contextspecific.

The focus of the book is on a foundational idea, the concept of capacitas, which signifies a status conferred upon citizens for the purpose of enabling them to participate in the economic life of the polity. In modern legal systems, ‘capacity’ is the principal juridical mechanism by which individuals and entities are empowered to enter into legally binding agreements and, more generally, to arrange their affairs using the instruments of private law. Legal capacity is thereby the gateway to involvement in the operations of a market economy.

Meltdown: A Free-market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts will Make Things Worse
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
HB3722 .W66 2009
From the Publisher: The media tells us that “deregulation” and “unfettered free markets” have wrecked our economy and will continue to make things worse without a heavy dose of federal regulation. But the real blame lies elsewhere. In Meltdown, bestselling author Thomas E. Woods Jr. unearths the real causes behind the collapse of housing values and the stock market—and it turns out the culprits reside more in Washington than on Wall Street. And the trillions of dollars in federal bailouts? Our politicians’ ham-handed attempts to fix the problems they themselves created will only make things much worse. Woods, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and winner of the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Award, busts the media myths and government spin. He explains how government intervention in the economy—from the Democratic hobby horse called Fannie Mae to affirmative action programs like the Community Redevelopment Act—actually caused the housing bubble. Most important, Woods, author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History, traces this most recent boom-and-bust—and all such booms and busts of the past century—back to one of the most revered government institutions of all: the Federal Reserve System, which allows busy-body bureaucrats and ambitious politicians to pull the strings of our financial sector and manipulate the value of the very money we use. Meltdown also provides a timely history lesson to counter the current clamor for a new New Deal. The Great Depression, Woods demonstrates, was only as deep and as long as it was because of the government interventions by Herbert Hoover (no free-market capitalist, despite what your high school history teacher may have taught you) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (no savior of the American economy, in spite of what the mainstream media says). If you want to understand what caused the financial meltdown—and why none of the big-government solutions being tried today will work—Meltdown explains it all.

Global Legal Studies — Recent Acquisitions

Adjudicating Climate Change: State, National, and International Approaches
edited by William C.G. Burns, Hari M. Osofsky
K3593 .A93 2009 (New Book Shelf)
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The Confluence of Public and Private International Law: Justice, Pluralism and Subsidiarity in the International Constitutional Ordering of Private Law
Alex Mills
K7040 .M55 2009
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Evidence before the International Court of Justice
Anna Riddell and Brendan Plant
KZ6287 .R53 2009
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Frederick William Maitland and the History of English Law
James R. Cameron
KD626 .C35 1961
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Global Standards–Local Action: 15 Years Vienna World Conference on Human Rights: Conference Proceedings of the International Expert Conference held in Vienna on 28 and 29 August 2008
edited by Wolfgang Bendek et al.
K3239.8 .G56 2009
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Human Rights as Indivisible Rights: The Protection of Socio-economic Demands under the European Convention on Human Rights
Ida Elisabeth Koch
KJC5132 .K63 2009
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International Children’s Rights
Sara Dillon
K639 .D555 2010
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Justifying International Acts
Lea Brilmayer
KZ3110.B75 A33 1989
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Means to an End: U.S. Interest in the International Criminal Court
Lee Feinstein, Tod Lindberg
KZ6311 .F45 2009
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The Protection of Ambient Air in International and European Law
edited by Harry Post
K3593 .P75 2009
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Public Law and Democracy in the United Kingdom and the United States of America
P.P. Craig
K3150 .C73 1990
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The Treatment of Prisoners under International Law
Nigel Rodley with Matt Pollard
K5519 .R63 2009
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U.S. Customs: A Practitioner’s Guide to Principles, Processes, and Procedures
editors, Michael D. Sherman, J. Steven Jarreau, John B. Brew
KF6694 .U15 2009 (New Book Shelf)
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Bill of Rights Day

Bill of Rights Day first became a federal day of observance on November 27th, 1941 when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt designated December 15th as a “day to be remembered and observed by those institutions of a democratic people which owe their very existence to the guarantees of the Bill of Rights.” On that day in 1791, the first Congress of the United States ratified the Bill of Rights, a document which spelled out some of the essential freedoms and rights of individual citizens of the United States as the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution.

Come by the Library lobby to check out our display of Library books and videos highlighting the importance of our Bill of Rights.